Are ATM/POS Data Relevant When Nowcasting Private Consumption?

Policymakers need timely and reliable information on the current state of the economy as macroeconomic forecasts and policy decisions are strongly affected by the quality and completeness of this assessment. Therefore, forecasters are always in search of new indicators that are related with the macroeconomic variable of interest and available earlier. This paper proposes the use of the ATM/POS data as an indicator to estimate private consumption. An application for Portugal is presented as a case study, where the out of sample performance of this indicator is evaluated against some benchmark naïve models and other alternative bridge models. The results clearly support the use of this information to nowcast non durables private consumption.

Calendar Effects in Daily ATM Withdrawals

This paper analyses the calendar effects present in Automated Teller Machines (ATM) withdrawals of residents, using daily data for Portugal for the period from January 1st 2001 to December 31st 2008. The results presented may allow for a better understanding of consumer habits and for adjusting the original series for calendar effects. Considering the Quarterly National Accounts’ procedure of adjusting data for seasonality and working days effects, this correction is important to ensure the use of the ATM series as an instrument to nowcast private consumption.

The effects of low-cost countries on Portuguese manufacturing import prices

This paper estimates the direct effect of low-cost countries on Portuguese manufacturing import prices, using detailed data both by product and by geographical market for the period 1997-2006. The results point to a negative but modest direct effect when compared with studies available for other countries. This is understandable given the lower share of low-cost countries in Portuguese imports. However, besides this direct effect, import prices were influenced by several other factors, some also related to the increasing presence of low-cost countries in international markets. Overall, this lower direct effect was not reflected in a differentiated evolution of manufacturing import prices in Portugal as its evolution was very close to the average of the euro area countries

Oil prices assumptions in macroeconomic forecasts: should we follow futures market expectations?

In macroeconomic forecasting, in spite of its important role in prices and activity developments, oil prices are usually taken as an exogenous variable for which assumptions have to be made. This paper evaluates the forecasting performance of futures markets prices against other popular technical procedure, the carry-over assumption. The results suggest that it is almost indifferent to opt for the futures market prices or the carry over assumption for short-term forecasting horizons (up to 12 months), while, for longer-term horizons, they favour the use of futures market prices. However, as futures markets prices reflect the markets expectations for the world economic activity, futures oil prices should be adjusted whenever the market expectations for the world economic growth are different from the values underlying the macroeconomic scenarios in order to assure fully internal consistency of those scenarios.